Eighteen international writers respond to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today.

Original work by Enrique Vila-Matas, Olivia Sudjic, Jon Fosse, Inger Wold Lund, Vi Khi Nao, Patricia Portela, Lucie Elven, Mara Coson, Christina Hesselholdt, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Naja Marie Aidt, Michael Salu, Joanna Walsh, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Anna Zett, Emilio Fraia, Frode Grytten, and Olga Ravn

Translations by Margaret Jull Costa, Zoe Perry, Martin Aitken, Denise Newman, Paul Russell Garrett, Damion Searls, and Rahul Bery

Meditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease - or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species' trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants, and foodstuffs around us in a new light?

The anthology takes its name from Steven Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture compendium of product reviews, essays, and articles on the themes of self-sufficiency, ecology, and alternative education. By giving "access to tools", a new social order and a more sustainable Earth was imagined.

Compiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen.

Praise for Tools for Extinction

The strongest lockdown literature

- Michael La Pointe, TLS

All the pieces here feel like they could end abruptly. They often do. This gives the collection a start and stop quality that feels appropriate. Our newsfeed minds are often diving in and self-ejecting out of intimate scenes from others' lives. Reading this book is akin to wandering around the authors homes, seeing if they've got any grand truths on the mantelpiece or in the basket on the landing. But there's often no lesson to be learned from solitude other than the experience of it. The hope carried in this book is that we can lean on fiction even beyond its breaking point - and our own

- Republic of Consciousness

Tools for Extinction grapples with the grief, trauma and anxiety of Covid-19 without presenting these phenomena as something entirely new. It is not a time capsule or a pandemic diary. It is not meant to be a record of an aberration to be read in libraries and schools in 2021 that look just like those of 2019. Tools for Extinction is meant to show that artists will have to adapt. The fact that the book came together in a few short months during a lockdown shows it can be done. And the resonance that the writing has for a reader still in lockdown shows that art still matters

- Artist Books Reviews

Tools for Extinction is acute literature. . . it signals the emergence of crisis-responsive fiction

- Klaus Rothstein, Weekendavisen

Tools for Extinction grapples with the grief, trauma and anxiety of Covid-19.

About the Author
Emilio Fraia was born in Sao Paulo in 1982. Sevastopol, his third book, was one of the winners of the Biblioteca Nacional Prize and a finalist for the Oceanos Prize and Jabuti Prize. One of Granta's Best Young Brazilian Writers, Fraia has been awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship and is currently an editor at Companhia das Letras. Olga Ravn (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She has also edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's texts and books and was involved in the recent revival of Ditlevsen's work in English. Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Hoeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Orstavik's Love. Damion Searls is an award-winning translator. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Doeblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, Gide, Christa Wolf, Patrick Modiano, and Nescio, as well as writing criticism and poetry, editing a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau's Journal, and producing a lost work of Hermann Melville's.


Book Information
ISBN 9781999992828
Author Enrique Vila-Matas
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Lolli Editions
Publisher Lolli Editions
Weight(grams) 208g